Has America entered the age of 'megadroughts'?

February 15, 2015 4:36 PM

5
0

Before this century ends, the Southwest and Central Plains states are likely to shrivel under a decades-long megadrought worse than those that ended the Ancestral Pueblo civilization in the last millennia, a new study finds.

Based on tree-ring records, scientists know that severe droughts coincided with the collapse of the Ancestral Pueblo culture. Great droughts struck in the 1100s and 1200s, at the same time as the abandonment of the stone villages at Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon and elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau.